Why We Should Care About Josh Wolf

Today I had a conversation about activism and journalism, and the imprisoned SF blogger, Josh Wolf, came up. Wolf is a 24-year-old self-described anarchist and independent journalist, who attended a G-8 protest that occurred in the Mission last year and videotaped the event. He ran into trouble when federal authorities requested that he hand over his footage to aid them in an investigation of an alleged attempt to set a police car on fire during the protest. He declined and ended up in jail.

Wolf is a blogger who shoots video and sometimes sells it to local news outlets. One of the reasons Wolf said he was at the protest with his camera was that he knew that the media wouldn't be covering the protest otherwise. If the protest hadn't gotten ugly (a policeman was injured in a melee), it's possible that the footage might only have made it to Wolf's blog. As it turned out, he sold some edited footage to a local TV news here in San Francisco. Wolf contends that he did not capture any video of the alleged car burning attempt and there is nothing in his tapes that would aid in that investigation.

In an interview with Amy Goodman broadcast on Democracy Now! in February, Wolf said, "Essentially, what the government wants me to do, as we can tell, is to identify civil dissidents who were attending this march, who were in mask and clearly did not want to be identified, but whose identities I may know some of, as their contact that I’ve been following in documenting civil dissent in the San Francisco Bay Area for some two-and-a-half years now."

It seems to me that the question of whether or not Wolf is a journalist is not really the issue here. The ACLU and the Reporters Committee filed amicus curiae briefs stating that they believe that if this case was under investigation by state authorities, Wolf would most definitely be within his rights to refuse handing over the tapes and testifying before the grand jury under California's Shield Law. But this is a federal investigation, and there is no national shield law for journalists. Federal authorities got involved with the investigation because they say that the alleged crime of attempting to burn a police car is within their jurisdiction because the SF Police Department receives funding from the federal government and the car is therefore federal property. They say that they are not making this a federal case solely to get around the California shield law. Hmm...Okay.

That aside, the bigger issue at play is the "chilling effect" that this case could have on journalism in this country. In an OJR article, Christine Tatum, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, said: "As unconventional and non-traditional as [Josh Wolf's] work in journalism may be in many respects, he is contesting an age-old argument... and that's that journalists never should be arms of law enforcement." If the government could ask journalists to turn over their notes or video any time that they think the materials "might be" useful to them in an investigation, what kind of effect would that have on reporters' ability to do their jobs? A healthy democracy depends on the constitutional protection not only of confidential sources, but also of the newsgathering process itself. Of course, it depends on how you interpret the First Amendment, but I'm inclined to agree with Wolf that it protects him in this case.

And I sure hope it does, because if not, we may be getting future news from AnonymousBlogger3456 instead of the NY Times.

What do you think?